The Development of Thinking and Reasoning, 1st Edition
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The Development of Thinking and
Reasoning
Edited by Pierre Barrouillet and Caroline Gauffroy
First published 2013
by Psychology Press
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Psychology Press
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© 2013 Psychology Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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ISBN: 978-1-84872-101-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-84872-132-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-06874-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon
Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
1 Introduction – from Piaget to dual-process theories: the complexities
of thinking and reasoning development
PIERRE BARROUILLET AND CAROLINE GAUFFROY
Thinking and reasoning beyond Piaget’s conceptions
Dual-process approaches
PART I Thinking and reasoning: beyond Piaget’s conceptions
2 Epistemic cognition and development
DAVID MOSHMAN
The literatures of epistemic cognition
Concepts
Propositions
Relations to other work
Suggestions for research
Conclusion
3 The development of the rational imagination: how children create
counterfactual alternatives to reality
JULIE E. MEEHAN AND RUTH M. J. BYRNE
Introduction
Counterfactual thoughts
Thinking about reality and its alternatives
The counterfactual perspective
Thinking about what is not there
Pictures and possibilities
Mental images and possibilities
Counterfactual creation skills
4 The development of reasoning by analogy
USHA GOSWAMI
Early research on the development of analogical reasoning
The role of relational knowledge in solving item analogies
Relational knowledge and the ‘relational similarity constraint’
Problem-solving paradigms for studying analogy
The role of explicit goal structure
The role of functional fixedness
Analogies as tools for educational innovation
Analogies in foundational domains
Inhibition and the efficiency of retrieval as constraints on analogical
reasoning
Analogical reasoning in infancy?
Analogies in reading and mathematics
Conclusion
5 The development of abstract conditional reasoning
HENRY MARKOVITS
How do different theories account for abstract reasoning?
Development of concrete and abstract conditional reasoning: empirical
data
A representational redescriptive model of abstract reasoning
PART II Dual-processes approaches
6 Dual processes and mental models in the development of conditional
reasoning
PIERRE BARROUILLET AND CAROLINE GAUFFROY
The mental model theory of conditionals
A mental model theory for the development of conditional reasoning
Evaluating the truth-value of conditionals
Pragmatic and semantic modulations
Evaluating the probability of conditionals
Dual-process accounts of conditional reasoning: the test of development
Conclusions
7 Heuristics and biases: insights from developmental studies
KINGA MORSANYI AND SIMON J. HANDLEY
Developmental trends in heuristic reasoning
The factors that affect the prevalence of heuristic reasoning: knowledge,
cognitive capacity, instructions, and thinking dispositions
The study
Concluding comments
8 Culture and developments in heuristics and biases from preschool
through adolescence: challenges and implications for social
development
PAUL KLACZYNSKI
Introduction
Dual-process theories: criticisms and revisions
Issues and potential controversies in developmental heuristics and biases
research
Emerging evidence, the age-knowledge issue, and heuristics during
adolescence
Culture and early indications of heuristics and biases
Conclusions
9 Intuition, reasoning and development: a fuzzy-trace theory approach
VALERIE F. REYNA
Introduction
Content and cognitive options
Worked examples: reasoning about risks, probabilities, and consequences
Conclusions and overview
10 Dual processes in the development of reasoning: the memory side of
the theory
CARLOS F. A. GOMES AND CHARLES J. BRAINERD
False memory: definition and measurement
Theoretical bases for predicting developmental reversals in false memory
Developmental reversals in false memory
Concluding comments
Index
Illustrations
Figures
4.1 The analogy terms, correct answer and distractors for the analogy ‘bird
is to nest as dog is to doghouse’
4.2 Examples of the types of stimuli used for the ‘cutting’ analogy of
Goswami and Brown (1989), who contrasted Appearance Same (AS) and
Appearance Differs (AD) conditions
4.3 The picture for the analogy ‘dog chases cat chases mouse :: mum
chases boy chases girl’
6.1 Distribution of response pattern in the truth testing task
6.2 Percent of participants exhibiting patterns of responses
6.3 Percent of response patterns as a function of grades for NN and BB
conditionals
6.4 Percent of response patterns as a function of grades for promises and
threats
6.5 Example of material given to participants in the probability task
6.6 Percent of response patterns as responses to the probability task
7.1 The cylinders task
7.2 Age trends in the overall proportion of heuristic, normative, and “other”
responding across the different age groups
8.1 Ratings of modus ponens and affirmation of the consequent conflict and
no-conflict conclusions by knowledge and confidence
8.2 Age differences in generalization ratings from obese and average-weight
targets
8.3 Age differences in obesity representativeness judgments on no-conflict
and conflict problems
8.4 Anti-juvenile justice biases in reasoning and representativeness-based
decisions
8.5 American and Chinese children’s average-obese biases
8.6 Preschoolers’ drink rating biases
8.7 Chinese and American preschoolers’ “likeability” ratings of average-
weight children
10.1 The effects of necessity manipulations on false memory as a function
of chronological age
10.2 The effects of sufficiency manipulations on false memory as a function
of chronological age
Tables
3.1 The percentages of children who gave the correct answers to
counterfactual questions
6.1 Probabilities of true and false conditionals for the different
interpretations
7.1 Examples of the tasks used by Morsanyi and Handley
7.2 Lost ticket and lost money scenarios
7.3 Proportion of different types of responses across age groups
7.4 Correlations between heuristic responding and the individual
differences variables in each age group
9.1 Hypothetical probability judgments
Contributors
Pierre Barrouillet, Département de psychologie, Faculté de Psychologie et
des Sciences de l’Education, Geneva, Switzerland. Email:
pierre.barrouillet@ unige.ch
Charles J. Brainerd, Departments of Human Development and
Psychology, College of Law, Cornell University, United States. Email:
[email protected]Ruth M.J. Byrne, School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience,
Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland, Email:
[email protected]Caroline Gauffroy, Département de psychologie, Faculté de Psychologie
et des Sciences de l’Education, Geneva, Switzerland. Email:
caroline.gauffroy@ unige.ch
Carlos F. A. Gomes, Department of Human Development, College of
Human Ecology, Cornell University, United States, Email:
[email protected]Usha Goswami, Center for Neuroscience in Education, University of
Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, Email:
[email protected]Simon J. Handley, School of Psychology, University of Plymouth,
Plymouth, UK. Email:
[email protected] Paul Klaczynski, School of Psychological Sciences, University of
Northern Colorado, Greeley, USA. Email:
[email protected]Henry Markovits, Département de psychologie, Université du Québec,
Montréal, Canada. Email:
[email protected]Julie E. Meehan, School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience,
Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland, Email:
[email protected]Kinga Morsanyi, School of Psychology, Queen’s University, Belfast,
[email protected]David Moshman, Educational Psychology, University of Nebraska-
Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA. Email:
[email protected]Valerie F. Reyna, Departments of Human Development and Psychology,
Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research, Cornell
University, United States. Email:
[email protected] 1
Introduction – from Piaget to dual-
process theories
The complexities of thinking and reasoning
development
Pierre Barrouillet and Caroline Gauffroy
Thinking and reasoning are pivotal processes for Homo sapiens as the main
mechanisms by which human beings achieve adaptation to their
environment. Not surprisingly, these processes have attracted for a long
time the interest of psychologists who designed a myriad of tasks and
paradigms to assess human thinking capacities and elaborated a variety of
theories accounting for induction, deduction, problem solving, judgment,
and decision making. The crucial adaptive role of thinking and reasoning
abilities for our species naturally raises the question of their origin and
development. One of the most influential responses to this question was
provided by Piaget, who suggested that the structures of thought are neither
innate nor extracted by experience from our environment, but constructed
by children themselves from their actions and interactions with this
environment. Though further investigations and theoretical refinements led
many developmental psychologists to jettison the logical constructivism
coined by Piaget, the impact of his conceptions proved remarkably
enduring. Besides the controversies and theoretical debates engendered by
the empirical investigation of Piaget’s claims, his main achievement is
probably to have brought the origin and development of reasoning and
rationality to psychologists’ attention as one of the main questions of
developmental psychology. In line with this tradition, the Archives Jean
Piaget invited to Geneva in July 2010, on the occasion of their XIXth
advanced course, prominent specialists of cognitive development to present
and confront their conceptions during a conference entitled Thinking,
Reasoning and Development. This book prolongs and extends this event by
gathering together contributions from the main participants of this
conference and from leading researchers in the domain of thinking and
reasoning development who were especially invited to present their most
recent empirical and theoretical developments.
Piaget envisioned development as the construction of a rational
intelligence progressively overriding the intuitions that govern the
egocentric thinking of young children who would be enslaved by the
compelling intuitions that perception provides. Several decades of
investigations of adults’ thinking and reasoning have led to the conclusion
that human beings are less rational than Piaget thought (Evans, 1989, 2010;
Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Wason & Johnson-Laird, 1972),
while, at the same time, the illogicality of young children was called into
question by studies demonstrating surprising early capacities (Dias &
Harris, 1990; Richards & Sanderson, 1999; see Markovits & Barrouillet,
2004, for a discussion of these results). This apparent paradox has elicited
two main avenues of research. The first aimed at investigating the capacities
of young children that had been underestimated by the Piagetian tradition.
These studies revealed unexpected reasoning capacities in school-aged
children, preschoolers and even toddlers, provided that they can mobilize
appropriate knowledge. The second avenue of research focused on the
difficulties encountered by adults in thinking logically, which led to the
biases and heuristics research program (Kahneman et al., 1982) and, more
recently, to the development of dual-process theories assuming that two
systems compete for governing behavior in the human mind: an
autonomous, fast, and tacit System 1 often responsible for illogicalities and
fallacies, and a slow, controlled, conscious and effortful System 2 that could
underpin logical thinking (Evans, 2008). Interestingly, this approach has
been recently extended to developmental questions (see the special issue of
Developmental Review, 2011, vol. 31, issue 2–3, on dual-process theories of
cognitive development). The different contributions of this volume reflect
these two research trends and have consequently been informally grouped
in two different parts.
The first part illustrates how modern approaches of thinking and
reasoning have gone beyond Piagetian legacy, either by investigating new
avenues that remained unexplored by Piaget, or by establishing that
development does not always conform to what Piaget assumed and that
young children have higher capacities than previously thought. Illustrative
of the first possibility is the theoretical reflection proposed by David
Moshman about the development of epistemic cognition, whereas the
second is illustrated by the exploration by Julie Meehan and Ruth Byrne of
the development of a rational imagination and the capacity of young
children aged between three and four to reason counterfactually by creating
and manipulating alternatives to reality. In the same way, contrary to
Piaget’s claim that analogical reasoning was absent until early adolescence,
Usha Goswami reviews evidence that analogical reasoning is present in
very young children of three years of age or even younger, though this does
not mean that there is no further development. Henry Markovits addresses
the complex problem of the development of abstract reasoning, more
precisely abstract conditional reasoning, and describes a protracted
development through different levels of abstraction. His view departs from
Piaget’s conception by suggesting that the transitions from one level to
another could be best understood, following Karmiloff-Smith (1995), as
successive representational redescriptions rather than as the result of
reflective abstraction.
The second part is devoted to theoretical and empirical investigations
within the general framework provided by dual-process theories. Caroline
Gauffroy and I present a dual-process account of our mental model theory
of conditional reasoning in which we adopt a conservative view of the dual-
process approach in which System 1 processes would be relatively immune
from developmental changes, whereas System 2 analytical processes would
strongly develop during childhood and adolescence, accounting for a large
range of developmental trends in conditional reasoning. The following
contributions propose a different view of the developmental changes and
depart from the idea of an analytic logical System 2 that would
progressively override System 1 outputs. In their chapter, Kinga Morsanyi
and Simon Handley document the development of heuristics and biases
such as sunk cost or conjunction fallacies. If they observe that normative
responding tends to increase with age, their investigations lead to a
developmental pattern more complex than expected. In the same way, Paul
Klaczynski explores age increases in reasoning fallacies, heuristic
judgments, and reasoning biases in adolescence and the impact of culture
on this development. Valerie Reyna goes a step further in her fuzzy-trace
theory and assumes, in sharp contrast with both the Piagetian and the
computational approaches, that intuition is an advanced form of reasoning
that constitutes the default mode in adults. The parallel development of
verbatim-based analytical reasoning and gist-based intuitions produces
developmental reversals, children sometimes performing better than adults.
This is nicely illustrated by Carlos Gomes and Charles Brainerd who
document developmental reversals in the domain of false memories and
show that a dual-process approach provides a more accurate account of
these phenomena than Piagetian constructivism. We will now give a more
extended overview of the content of the book.
Thinking and reasoning beyond Piaget’s
conceptions
Though Piaget conceived and described his own research as the
construction of a “genetic epistemology” rather than as a developmental
psychology, Moshman, in Chapter 2, notes that he did not systematically
study epistemic cognition, that is, knowledge about the truth and
justification of beliefs, but concentrated on knowledge about time, space,
causality, physical quantities or number. Moshman fills this gap by
presenting a theoretical and developmental account of epistemic cognition,
beginning by the definition of a series of concepts. He endorses a strong
conception of development as a pattern of change that is qualitative, and not
uniquely quantitative, and progressive, leading to higher and better levels.
Defining epistemology as the study of knowledge with regard of truth and
justification, he conceives the epistemic development as changes in
conceptual knowledge about truth. He then articulates 16 theoretical
propositions, one of the strongest being that the main change in the
development of thinking, reasoning, and rationality affects metacognition,
including epistemic cognition. Moshman addresses the implication of his
theoretical conceptions to psychological and educational research as well as
critical thinking. His chapter ends by a series of suggestions for research in
which he suggests that the sequence from objectivism to subjectivism and
then metasubjective rationality that is observed in adolescents should also
be seen at different ages in childhood within specific domains. Thus,
Moshman stresses that research on epistemic cognition (and probably on
thinking and reasoning?) must recognize its developmental basis.
Epistemic cognition and development are directly related to the question
addressed by Meehan and Byrne in their study of counterfactual thinking
and reasoning in Chapter 3. Adults often imagine, especially after bad
outcomes, what would have happened and how situations could have turned
if some event did, or did not, occur, and children do the same thing.
Thinking counterfactually, that is, reasoning on alternatives to reality,
requires imagining two possibilities – the facts as they are known (or
supposed) and the imagined conjecture – while keeping track of the
epistemic status of the two possibilities. Meehan and Byrne’s chapter
focuses on the development of a key ability, that is, the ability to create the
counterfactual alternative, something that requires either to delete or to add
something to our representation of reality. This ability occurs fairly early in
